The Battle of the Somme
Graham Caldwell describes the ill-fated offensive which raged for 141 days between July and November 1916, presented here in colour
Graham Caldwell describes the ill-fated offensive which raged for 141 days between July and November 1916. It was a colossal show of arms that produced horrendous casualties, coming to represent the futility of war on the Western Front.
Beginning at 7.30am on Saturday 1 July 1916, in the Somme region of northern France, 163 British infantry battalions, each with a strength of around 900 men, left the safety of their trenches and went over the top along a 25 mile front. Weighed down by
66lb of equipment, each man walked directly ahead at the slow pace of two miles per hour, a drill they had been practising during the previous nine weeks as it was considered more likely to maintain discipline for raw recruits with no previous combat experience. They advanced straight into the face of undamaged barbed-wire obstacles, behind which were well-sighted machine guns and artillery that were zeroed-in on the killing ground. The men were mown down, row by row, in a scene of horrific slaughter. By midnight the count was 57,470 British casualties, including 19,240 dead, the greatest loss of life in a single day in the history of the British Army. How had it come to this?
Kitchener’s New Army
By January 1916 the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France and Flanders was a totally different makeup to the one that went to war in August 1914, the Army having suffered over 500,000 casualties by this time. In late 1914, Lord Kitchener launched a major recruiting campaign
which, by December 1915, had produced over 2.6 million New Army volunteers. Many were recruited from small communities like Accrington, Barnsley, and Grimsby, with the promise of serving with their local pals, which became known as Pals Battalions. Between July and November 1916, no fewer than 27 New Army divisions were at one time or other in action on the Somme battlefields. Each British division had an infantry component of around 12,000 effectives and these reinforcements enabled the activation of the British Fourth Army on 5 February 1916, commanded by General Sir Henry Rawlinson.
On 6 December 1915, the French Commander-in-Chief, General Joseph Joffre, chaired a conference of Allied representatives to discuss how they might win the war the following year. It concluded with a joint-statement by the representatives of Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, Russia and Serbia
that said, in part: ‘Decisive results will only be obtained if the offensives of the Armies of the Coalition are made simultaneously, so that the enemy will not be able to transport reserves from one front to another.’ Joffre told Haig that the French Army was only capable of one big offensive effort in 1916, offering to provide 42 divisions from its strength of 2.8 million men, provided that Haig agreed to throw in British support. This provided
Haig an opportunity to bed-in the inexperienced New Army soldiers under real battle conditions. The offensive was to commence in July on both sides of the River Somme with the objective to break through the weak German defences, but this decision failed to take into account what the enemy might do in the meantime!
General der Infanterie Eric von Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, had his own ideas on how to win the war in 1916. This was to bleed France to death. The place Falkenhayn selected for his war of attrition was the medieval fortress city of Verdun, judged to be the place where France would be compelled to throw in every man they have to retain it, otherwise its loss would be an enormous blow to morale. Falkenhayn’s plan was to secure the city heights and draw the French reserves into a mincing machine of continuous German heavy artillery. Verdun lies
175 miles south of the Somme region where, in blind ignorance, Haig was expecting Joffre to keep his promise to provide the 42 French divisions for the July offensive, but Falkenhayn moved five months earlier and, on 21 February 1916, the first shot from one of the 1,200 German heavy howitzers struck Verdun’s Cathedral, commencing a bombardment that would stretch for 10 months, throwing Haig’s plans to play a supporting role into disarray.
Haig goes it alone!
Well almost. Joffre’s token contribution was the eight divisions of General
Emile Fayolle’s French Sixth Army along a 10 mile front opposite Peronne, whilst Haig was now responsible for an 18 mile front stretching from Gommecourt in the north to just below Montauban next to the French positions. It was the British that now had the major responsibility to break through the German defences and beyond, except that now Haig was lumbered with an additional objective. Joffre had been pressuring the British for the Somme offensive to hurry up and start so that it would pull German divisions away from Verdun, where the French army had already rotated 66 of their divisions and were now at a critical stage of survival. Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, which comprised 22 divisions in five Corps, was selected by Haig to spearhead the upcoming offensive, of which 11 divisions (plus two of Third Army on its left) would go in first. Seven of the 11 divisions in the first wave comprised citizen soldiers who only months previously had been in civilian trades.
Facing the British was the understrength German Second
Army commanded by General der Infanterie Fritz von Below, comprising 23 divisions, a proportion of which were opposite the French. Before the whistles blew for the men to go over the top on the first day of July, preparations had been underway long before. German positions had been well mapped as a result of air photography courtesy of the Royal Flying Corps. Royal Engineer tunnellers had secretly planted eight large and 11 smaller underground explosive charges (called mines), which were exploded two minutes prior to the attack. Whilst the mines totally obliterated the enemy trenches, the resultant craters became a hated feature of the battlefield. As the British infantrymen advanced, they became trapped inside the massive craters, becoming easy prey for German machine gunners. The troops were promised that the previous seven-day artillery bombardment,
which expended a combined total of 1,738,000 heavy explosive and shrapnel shells, would cut the German thick barbed-wire entanglements, but sadly there was a shortage of shrapnel shells needed to cut the wire, plus it was later estimated that up to 30% of the high explosive shells were duds. British intelligence had also failed to detect that the enemy had dug deep bomb-proof bunkers.
The first day: Saturday 1 July 1916
From 7.30am onwards, 150,000 British infantrymen, weighed down with 66lb of equipment, making it impossible to move faster than a slow walk or lie down quickly, scrambled out of their trenches and into No Man’s Land in a tactical four-line advance.
So confident that the week-long bombardment would obliterate the defences, Haig had 160,000 troopers of the 2nd Indian Cavalry Division and the Canadian Cavalry Brigade on standby to exploit the expected breakthrough. Needless to say, this obsolete mobile force was never called upon. Private Frank Raine said: ‘We were told that there was going to be this bombardment and all we had to do was get up and walk across, on no account had we to stop for anything, just walk straight through to Berlin. Not one of us in our battalion got ever got to the German lines. You couldn’t, it was absolutely impossible.’
Panning from north to south along the front line at H-Hour, the VII Corps of Third Army’s subsidiary attack, intended to draw off enemy reserves, failed to reach its objective of Gommecourt. Next in line was VIII Corps of Fourth Army, which included the 31st Division made up entirely of Pals battalions from Yorkshire and Lancashire, but it was unable to make any progress. Private Maurice Symes said: ‘We were in extended order, just walking straight towards the German lines, sitting ducks all the way, straight into a death trap, hundreds of us. Just hopeless.’ VIII Corps also included the 29th Division, which had in its 88th Brigade the 1st Battalion, Royal Newfoundland Regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Hadow. At 9.15am the battalion advanced toward the enemy held village of Beaumont-Hamel and straight into a hail of machine gun and artillery fire. As a dominion
of the British Empire and not yet part of Canada, the Newfoundlanders, volunteers all, were brigaded with British regulars. Walking in lines with the sun behind them, all 780 infantrymen were clearly visible to the German defenders. Within 20 minutes of leaving their trench most were dead, dying or wounded. The next day 68 men answered roll call, the unit having suffered a 90% casualty rate.
X Corps, including Northern
Irish volunteers of the 36th (Ulster) Division, made only one slight gain of half a mile deep. Private Arnold
Dale related: ‘As we approached the German trenches prior to our own bombardment lifting, we saw what a terrible job it would be to get through the German wire. It was so thick, it looked solid black, undamaged that in my opinion a rabbit couldn’t have got through it.’ At the junction with
III Corps, which included Home Counties volunteers of 12th Division, a small penetration was achieved, but everywhere else III Corps was beaten back. Private Maurice Symes recalled: ‘I could see people going down, you know, getting shot. And then I got hit myself, it knocked me out. It felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach. I knew I couldn’t go any further and crawled into a shell hole.’
On their right XV Corps, which included volunteers from Wales in the 38th (Welsh) Division, was partially successful in capturing Mametz and making a bridgehead a mile wide and three-quarters of a mile deep. Private Donald Murray was one that made it to the first German line. He said: ‘It seemed to me that I was just one man left; I couldn’t see anything at all, except men lying dead, or screaming from horrendous wounds as they hung on the barbed wire. I was alone in a hell of fire and smoke and stink. I crept back through shell holes, through mud and back into our trench and still no one was there, until gradually we congregated in one’s and two’s.’
The XIII Corps used three divisions up front, including the 30th Division comprising mainly Pals battalions from Liverpool and Manchester. They all successfully advanced one and a half miles into German territory on their two-mile front and captured Montauban. Private John Glen later gave his account: ‘We were getting machine gun fire, but no orders because all the officers were shot down. The fire was simply mowing them down.’
By contrast, the six French divisions captured all their objectives. The XXXV and 1st Colonial Corps made a breach four miles wide and a mile deep, whilst French XX Corps advanced straight to their intended new positions, capturing ground two and a half miles wide and a mile deep. Due to ignorance of the situation and not being told that the wire was untouched, Haig ordered a renewal of the attack along the whole line for the next day, but fierce German counter-attacks on 2 July prevented it. German casualties that day were a relatively low 6,226, plus another 1,912 who suffered during the Anglo-French preliminary seven-day bombardment.
Taking stock: July-August 1916
Major reorganisations on both side were immediately implemented. On
the 3 July the VIII and X Corps were taken from Rawlinson and put under Lieutenant General Herbert Gough, commanding the newly created Reserve Army (renamed Fifth Army on 30 October). Falkenhayn, having realised that von Below must be urgently reinforced, took seven divisions and 38 heavy batteries from the Verdun front, with more to follow. On 19 July Below’s Second Army was so large that it was split to form two separate armies. A new First Army under himself in the north, whilst General der Artillerie Max von Gallwitz became his superior (in command of Armeegruppe Gallwitz-Somme) whilst personally also commanding the Second Army.
Thankfully for Haig, the RFC gained air superiority by flying contact patrols to prevent enemy aeroplanes from spying on the BEF’s movements. Other tasks were aerial reconnaissance and photography, observation balloons and artillery spotting.
On 18 July the South African’s made their debut, making attacks on Longueval, Deville and High Woods. The 1st South African Brigade of four (volunteer) battalions, was commanded by Brigadier General Henry Lukin, integrated into the 9th (Scottish) Division, another New Army division. The South African’s held out until relieved five days later, having suffered a 75% casualty rate of 2,536 killed, wounded and missing.
Canadian and Anzac reinforcements arrive
By mid-July Haig required fresh formations to continue the offensive, still focussed on achieving a breakthrough, plus acceding to Joffre’s ever more pleading to draw more German divisions away from
Verdun. This strategy was certainly working, because on 28 August the German First and Second Armies became part of the newly created Heeresgruppe Rupprecht, commanded by Generalfeldmarschall Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which also took over the Sixth and Seventh Armies on either flank of the Somme Front. The first Allied reinforcement to arrive was II Anzac Corps, comprising one New Zealand and three Australian divisions under Lieutenant General Alexander Godley, which was allocated to Gough’s Reserve Army on 23 July for the capture of Pozieres Ridge.
Whilst the town itself was taken by the Anzacs, other forces failed to take the important heights of the ridge.
The following month the Canadian Corps of three (later four) divisions arrived on the Somme, commanded by Lieutenant General Julian Byng, which took part in the attack on Flers Courcelette. This began on the 15 September on a 12 mile front southwest of Bapaume. The 12 British and Canadian divisions experienced a new development called the creeping barrage. By advancing perilously close behind their own artillery fire, which gradually moved ahead on a set schedule, the tactic forced enemy snipers and machine gunners to stay under cover, thus minimising casualties when crossing no man’s land. However, for all its planning and new ideas, an advance of only one and a half miles along the front was achieved. It was during the Battle of Flers-Courcelette that Lieutenant Raymond Asquith was killed, the son of the British Prime Minister and Lieutenant Harold Macmillan, a future Prime Minister, was seriously wounded. Flers-Courcelette was also the first time that tanks were used in battle.
Tanks: too little, too late
The Mk.1 tank was armed either with two 6-pounder cannons, plus two machine guns (Males) or five machine guns (Females) housed in sponsons on either side. 48 Mk.1’s were assembled for the attack on Flers-Courcelette, 36 reached the frontline of which 27 made it to the German lines, but only six reached the third objective. Unfortunately, all were either disabled by shellfire or mechanical failures.
By September, with pressure now taken off Verdun, the front was extended 12 miles south of the Somme. This allowed General Joseph Micheler’s French Tenth Army to enter the battle on the right of Fayolle’s Sixth Army. Further British gains were made at the end of September due to actions at Morval and Thiepval Ridge, but in October the weather worsened and the ground turned to thick mud. Upon Joffre’s request, the battle continued into November with other small gains before snow brought an end after five months.
That 125,000 men of France,
Britain and its Dominions were lost for every one mile of ground gained in the advance is a shocking statistic but Germany also suffered incredible casualties, 650,000 of them. However, the Battle of the Somme’s strategic objective to inflict permanent damage on the German Army and draw off forces from Verdun to prevent the complete collapse of the French army was fulfilled, leaving the German Army with only poor quality conscripts.